After this week’s unfortunate
incident, by which I mean the election of He Whose Hands Must Not Be Mentioned,
I’ve had enough of American politics. The war in Eastern Ukraine hasn’t been in
the news much in the past couple years. It’s turned into a frozen conflict—a
stalemate between two rebel enclaves and a Ukraine that can’t take them back
without starting an all-out war with Russia.
Since I’ve done a couple
metaphysical interviews with the rebels before, I thought I’d pop over and see
how things are going. As you may remember from previous posts, a metaphysical
interview is where instead of talking to someone, you speculate about what they
might say. This is a legitimate journalistic technique now. Half of what you
find in the media was made up too.
I met my old friend Pavel in a
café in Donetsk, the capital and largest city of the so-called Donetsk People’s
Republic. The café was in what seemed to be the trendiest district of town, by
which I mean only half the block was bombed out or boarded up.
Scenic Donetsk
“So how are things?” I asked
Pavel.
“Excellent!” he said. “Granted, our
people eke out a grim existence in the face of unceasing war. But the Donetsk
People’s Republic is no longer a miserable enclave run by thugs and populated
mostly by people too old to flee. We are now a truly democratic country. We
just had our first truly democratic election.”
“Pavel,” I said, “I was here the
last time you held a vote, and someone could only call that ‘democratic’ if
they were lying through their teeth.”
“Not this time.” He grinned. “This
time we used truly democratic procedures. We took them from the birthplace of
democracy, the United States.”
“Usually people say the
birthplace of democracy was Athens. It was, you know, a democracy two thousand
years before the US came along.”
Pavel snorted. “Getting people
together, debating the issues, and having them vote—that is not true democracy.
Let me show you how true democracy works.” He took out an iPad and brought up a
map of the enclave overlaid by a grid. “First step was, we divided the Donetsk
People’s Republic into squares.”
“Why would you do that?”
“The United States is divided
into states,” said Pavel, “and most of them are square, or pretty close. So we
just used squares. It was easiest. Now the first step in the election is the
primary race.” He tapped his tablet and an overlay appeared on the map, showing a
road that wound through the grid. “The race starts here, at my cousin Iovan’s
farm.”
“It starts at one farm.”
“It starts in that square. But there
are only a few villages, and everybody but Iovan either fled the war or refused
to go to the caucuses—something about the vote being a mockery. So the first
step in the primary race ended up being when the candidates try to convince
Cousin Iovan to support them. The ones he supports get momentum.”
“This is good because…”
“Momentum propels things forward.
That means the candidate can skip some of the later votes. But if they lose
momentum, they have to go back and do the previous votes again.”
“Um, Pavel,” I said, “that’s not
an election. That’s Snakes and Ladders.”
Pavel frowned. “I thought it seemed familiar. Doesn’t
matter. The primaries are only the first stage. The candidates who win them go
on to the campaign.”
“Dare I ask what the campaign is
like?”
“It is very democratic. The
candidates hold rallies and debate each other. Newspapers make endorsements.
Vladimir Putin makes an endorsement too, only he doesn’t tell you what it is.
He just has hackers steal information about the other candidates and release anything
that might be embarrassing. Then after the campaign is election night. We hold
a vote in each square, and the candidate who gets the most votes, gets all the
votes from that square.”
“That’s kind of weird,” I said.
“It was fun!” said Pavel.
“Counting votes is so boring. One candidate gradually gets ahead—yawn. This way,
you get to watch squares flip over on election night. There is very complicated
strategy too, because there are safe squares and swing squares. The candidates
cannot just try to appeal to the voters, but must devise a Path to Victory. Who
will win the crucial swing square of Five Villages Near the Don River Plus the
Southeastern Corner of Komsomolske? That one was a real nail-biter.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself,”
I said. “So what was the outcome?”
Pavel looked down at the table.
“The outcome was less fun. The winner was Bobov the Angry Clown.”
I coughed.
“Bobov has a popular TV show. He
tells racist jokes while scantily-clad women dance around. Many voters thought
he was a real man, very virile. Probably because his wig is shaped like a giant
pair of testicles.”
“You’re telling me that people
voted for a clown.”
“Actually, most of them voted
for someone else. But Bobov won the most squares. His voters were more efficiently
distributed. See, his opponent won most of her votes in this one square here.”
“That square says ‘City of
Donetsk’.”
“That is where the city is, yes,”
said Pavel.
“And that’s where most of the people
live, right?”
“Yes.”
“I think I can guess why she won
most of her votes there.”
“But it is only one square,”
said Pavel. “Bobov won lots of squares
by very narrow margins. So he won the election.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “How
much did he lose the popular vote by? Was it close?”
Pavel shrugged. “We don’t know. We
didn’t finish counting. Once it was clear Bobov won, why bother counting the
rest of the votes?” I stared at him in shock. He fidgeted with his napkin. “I
mean, we’ll get it done eventually. Maybe sometime in December.”
“So you had a truly democratic
election where a bunch of votes haven’t even been counted because they don’t matter. That’s what you’re telling me?”
Pavel crossed his arms. “I am
deeply offended by your skeptical tone. This was a truly democratic election
where every citizen of the People’s Republic could vote. Unless they had been
convicted of a crime. Or had unpaid parking tickets. And they registered at
least six weeks in advance, and brought two pieces of photo ID, plus a valid
credit card. The credit card is for age verification purposes only.”
“If that’s how you ran your
election,” I said, “it doesn’t surprise me you ended up electing a clown. Did
he even have a platform, or was he running as a joke?”
“His core policy is to build a
wall on the border with Moldova. He wants to stop Moldovans from coming in and
taking our jobs.”
“Yeah. Pavel, your enclave doesn’t
border on Moldova. Moldova’s like five hundred miles west of here.”
“Our voters know that!” said
Pavel. “Of course they do. I mean, they know now. Right after the election results were announced, everybody got
out their phones and googled ‘Where is Moldova again?’”
I shook my head.
“So the last step in our truly democratic
election was,” Pavel said, “we called up Putin and asked him to annul the whole
thing. But it turns out he is a big fan of the Bobov Show.” Pavel forced
himself to smile. “We are determined to work constructively with our new
leader.”
“Good luck with that,” I said.
